May 2009

May 19, 2009

As proud as I am of all Levenger Press books, I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of any new book as much as John F. Kennedy: The Making of His Inaugural Address. It’s coffee-table large and disarmingly beautiful. The facsimiles of JFK’s papers are life-size and cause a double-take, they look that real. But the real beauty is the experience you can have.

After turning the pages, I recommend you watch the DVD of JFK’s inaugural that comes with the book. Then watch it again, this time looking at the reading copy Kennedy had at the podium. (It’s one of the facsimiles.) What you’ll see, for the first time in history, are the many subtle changes JFK made on the fly as he spoke the words: we’ve superimposed them on the document. What a way to get a feel for history, as David McCullough says, “as interesting as it actually was.”

I’ve asked Mim Harrison, the editor of Levenger Press, to give you the backstory on this exclusive collector’s edition.

—Steve

It should be easy to get distracted inside the research room of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. I. M. Pei’s structure on the outskirts of Boston is a soaring outreach to sea and sky. Its expanse of windows creates a panorama of water and light. Looking out, you find yourself contemplating the larger view.

On the day I went in search of the documents that shaped JFK’s Inaugural Address—his dictation to his secretary, the typed drafts, Kennedy’s handwritten version and his all but illegible back-of-the-envelope notes—the view was particularly beguiling. It was a sparkling September day, the blue waters around Columbia Point glinting with silver and punctuated by crisp white sailboats. But opening the plain manila folders from the Kennedy archives, and touching the nearly 50-year-old papers inside, pulled me inside and into a different meditative trance.

The hieroglyphics of not-so-ancient history

The ever-helpful staff instructed me on how to open a folder of archival papers: gently, and with it flat on the desk so the papers wouldn’t curl. And only one folder at a time, as the papers they contain are loose rather than bound, and must remain in the correct place for the next set of hands.

I could make copies of whatever I wanted, provided I (gently) placed the small wooden marker indicating a copy on the glass of the photocopier first. For note-taking I could use pencils but not pens.

As I sifted through the papers, I found myself grateful for the absence of word processors and emails, with their ephemeral electronic trail. Instead, I was looking at heavily marked-up, typewritten sheets of onionskin paper—that curiously crinkly paper that’s probably the closest thing to ancient vellum we’ve had. The steno notebook held the hieroglyphics of Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. Soon those with the ability to read this shorthand will be as rare as those who read the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

There were no ZIP codes then. There were lots of secretaries. And rather than copies of emails, I was reading the 1960s equivalent: Western Union telegrams sent by block wire.

The only medium that could have been transported to 2009 was the long yellow legal pad Kennedy used to scrawl a version of his Inaugural Address.The power behind the words

Technology dates, but ideas transcend. What I discovered in researching JFK’s Inaugural Address was why his words remain powerful, even though they were framed against the menacing backdrop of a Cold War we stopped fighting long ago.

In part, it was his delivery. The historian David Greenberg described it as “the last expression of…Churchillian oratory.”

But there was more to it than that. Kennedy’s words were the manifestations of ideas and ideals that had been with JFK well before his election. Kennedy’s words were his own. After his inauguration, many of those words (though not all) would indeed become deeds.

When it’s at its best, the role of oratory in America’s history is one not merely of finely crafted language. It is the eloquence of ideas that become actions. Executed at the right moment, such eloquence has a way of changing history. Lincoln’s did, Kennedy’s did—even though neither president completed his historic agenda. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address is testament to the transformative power of words well used because they embrace a larger view.

“Let us begin anew,” JFK says at one point in his address. Almost half a century later, led by another young and eloquent president, Americans continue to do so. Words—powerful words, words rooted in the faith of their speaker and intended for the common good—can galvanize us into new actions today. The eloquence of ideas is the true flame that burns eternal.

Meantime, let me hear your memories of Kennedy here. Do you find a transcending eloquence in his words? Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)

May 18, 2009

He wrote his first poem at 10 and started his first business at 11. After a stint in Africa with the Peace Corps, Michael Masterson combined his love of writing with his love of business and launched into publishing. With his partners, Michael built Baltimore-based Agora into a $300+ million publisher of books and newsletters related to health, wealth and good living.

Michael also writes bestselling business books published by Wiley, including Automatic Wealth for Grads and Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business, with co-author Mary Ellen Tribby.

Yet the Michael Masterson I’ve come to know over the last decade is not merely a successful businessman. He’s a renaissance man who admires and pursues learning of all types—fine art and literature, good cigars and exotic travel, mastering the Sunday New York Times crossword.

All this is merely prelude to the story I want to share about Michael—the story of the community he’s building in Nicaragua, and the two historical figures who guided his thinking.Weekends on horseback

My in-laws raised their eyebrows when we asked them to watch the house over a long weekend while Lori and I popped down to Nicaragua. I don’t blame them. Nicaragua is still not a normal destination for Americans, many of whom, like my in-laws, recall something about Sandinistas and Daniel Ortega (who was re-elected in 2006). Nevertheless, Michael and his wife, Kathy, had invited us and some mutual friends down to Rancho Santana. Knowing Michael as I do, I couldn’t refuse.

International Living identified Nicaragua as a promising new destination well before other travel magazines did. It had much of the same benefits of its neighbor to the south, Costa Rica, while being less developed and less expensive. About 15 years ago, Mark followed his publication’s advice and went down to have a look.

It was raw country—even on the breathtakingly beautiful Pacific coastline. Michael had to go on horseback to survey the thousands of acres that were for sale. “It reminded me of what Florida must have looked like when Henry Flagler first saw it,” Michael told me.

Over the long weekend, I had a chance to tour the property with Michael by foot and on horseback, and to ask him about how he came to create Rancho Santana.

“It was amazing how completely undeveloped this was just 15 years ago. And in guiding me how to develop it, I do think of Henry Flagler,” he said. Then he told me why:

“What I love about Flagler is that after he made his millions in business with Rockefeller, he came to Florida and followed his dream. In Florida he spent his fortune and never made a nickel. He became a real estate developer, and few of them make money in the long run. But he was a truly great entrepreneur, a dreamer, and an idealist. He is a hero to me.

“Flagler had a vision for what Florida could become, and he went about creating that vision. He envisioned grand hotels connected by a railroad that would take people all the way down the state, including the engineering feat of the overseas railway to Key West. He created what we know and love about Saint Augustine, Palm Beach, Miami and Key West. If any one person can be said to have created Florida, it was Flagler.”

Michael read several books about Flagler, including Les Standiford’s captivating Last Train to Paradise. He was also influenced by Andrew Carnegie and the dangers of charity.

‘Less damage than good’

“Do less damage than good,” said Michael. “That’s my motto because charity is hard. Generally speaking, charity damages those who receive it. It feels good to those who give it, but Carnegie figured out that alms giving just didn’t work well. He did some pure giving, and he also believed in income tax, but only to the wealthy.”

Together with his partners, Michael has converted 3,000 acres in Nicaragua to an amenity-filled resort. But he didn’t stop there.

“We’ve built a health clinic for the many Nicaraguans working here. Now, my wife and I are developing a community center that will include an English school, a technical school, a library and a sports complex,” Michael said. “I don’t think of it as charity, but instead as providing educational and job opportunities in an area of the country where there is real need.”

Western author Louis L’Amour once said, “Read, read, read. Do, do, do.” Michael Masterson is one of the best exemplars of this advice I know.

Do you know others leading well-read lives of reading and action? I’d love to hear about them. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)

May 12, 2009

I first met Keith Ferrazzi at a Forbes CEO conference in New York City back in 2004. Keith had been hired to run a corporate speed-dating session among the participants. What a hoot! There I was, spending six minutes exchanging stories with Tony Ruys, the chairman of Heineken. I got to learn about beer while poor Tony had to hear about notebooks. But Keith was a force of energy, talent and enthusiasm that was infectious. I’d happily attend another Ferrazzi event, but fortunately for you and me, Keith also writes books (see below), so we can all easily follow his interesting and empowering advice.

Following up on my previous column on getting the most from college, I asked Keith if he had any thoughts to share on the subject. Turns out he cares deeply about it, as you’ll see by reading his four points below. BTW, Keith is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School.

—Steve

Four Points to Ensure Success Once Students Get Into College

1. Tap into Your Advisor Network

Undergrad is the one time in life in which you will be given advisors—and you don't even have to seek them out! Whether it be your academic advisor, your career advisor, your residential advisor, your peer advisor, your student group advisor, etc., you walk onto campus your first day with a network of trusted advisors, each of whom is individually responsible for an important part of your college experience. Too often you hear of students who met with their academic advisor "a few times" or "only when necessary" during their four years, or who distanced themselves from their rule-enforcing residential advisor as much as possible. More often than not, these students miss out on the invaluable resources handed to them for free.

The real "breakthrough" college students who make the most of their college experience tap into their advisor network and capitalize on the value built into these systems. I often lunched with my academic advisor, became best friends with my peer advisor, and still turn to my residential advisor for career and personal advice!

2. The Secret of Study Groups

One thing I learned very quickly in college was that I tended to perform much better on exams when I studied with a study group prior to the exam. It wasn't just any study group, however. Our group consisted of members who attended class regularly, who knew the material, and who would hold each other accountable for keeping up. Thus, when we all convened before a big exam, we could bounce questions and answers off each other rapidly and really feel confident that we had mastered the information from class.

The students who chose to keep to themselves and who didn't have these makeshift accountability groups never seemed to perform as well or, conversely, had to study that much harder on their own to perform well. I also benefited from leading these study groups because I knew if I could teach the material to others, I must have truly mastered the work.

3. Gatekeepers Are Significant

As mentioned in Never Eat Alone, some of the most important people on a college campus aren't faculty members but the support staff that keep the university running. One of my favorite people from undergrad was the administrative assistant in the Campus Life Office. In addition to knowing everyone on campus, this woman knew every activity, every event, and every opportunity that any student would need to know. She was easily more connected than even the chancellor with the various offices and colleges on campus, not to mention the more important fact that she, herself, was an amazing person with a storied history of her time working on campus, which was longer than most professors!

Too often I saw students limit their contact with her as they brushed by her desk to go down the hallway to the offices of administrators and deans. They will never realize how much they missed out on by forsaking one of the most important relationships one can have in college: the relationships with administrative assistants and other, well-connected gatekeepers.

4. Keep Yourself Together

The three points above all involve your relationships with other important people on campus, but before you are able to relate well with others, you really need to have yourself together. College is the first time so many young people are away from home. You often hear that sentence as a reason why people get out of control with alcohol or have poorer eating habits their freshman year. Well, it's also the same reason that freshmen become disorganized messes! All of a sudden every part of your life—eating, studying, working, etc.—is completely your responsibility. This is overwhelming for so many students who don't see the transition coming.

Before you go tapping into your advisor network, organizing study groups, or befriending the staff around campus, you need to know who you are and get yourself organized! Otherwise, these support systems won't know how to help you. Too often freshmen forget who they are in an attempt to avoid sticking out among their peers. It wasn't until the first few weeks in when I got comfortable just being myself that my social relationships in college really began to flourish. Don't be something that you're not, and be committed and organized about the person you are. That is when others will embrace you and can help you the most.

—Keith

For more of Keith’s advice, check out his new book, Who's Got Your Back. And look for the upcoming college version of his first bestseller Never Eat Alone for Students.

And now to you, dear reader: What’s the best advice you received as you went off to college? And has it translated into your life-after-graduation? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)

May 05, 2009

Across America, graduating high school seniors are gasping to catch their breaths after crossing the college application finish line. They have finally chosen, from the colleges that accepted them, the college they will attend. The tortuously long process of counseling, SAT prep courses, essay writing, campus visits, letters of recommendation, community service, leadership building, and testing, testing and more testing is enough to make a student’s eyes glaze over—if they’re still open after the all-nighters.

(At our house, the marathon ended when our younger son sent his acceptance to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Yes, I’m proud of him.)

But there is something flawed with the whole college application ordeal. Virtually all the emphasis is on where you get into college, and almost none on how to get the most out of college. It’s as if the brand name of the institution, and where it sits on overly simplified rankings, will be the most important factor in the student’s future life.

Rethinking the equation

In fact, what matters far more than the name on the hat is how the mind under the hat engages that college. Yet as a nation, we devote far fewer resources to helping students suck the marrow from colleges than on how to ace the SAT.

I recently spoke with Jeffrey Brenzel, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale, who says we’ve got it perfectly backwards.

“We’ve reversed the equation—that the college is going to make something out of your life, when actually it’s the student who makes something out of college,” he says.

Here’s what Dean Brenzel says students and their parents need to know:

“Any strong college contains infinitely more opportunity than any student, no matter how smart and motivated, can extract in four short years. No kid is going to tap out one of these places. If students are prepared to engage, they will find resources in abundance. If they are not, it doesn’t matter if they are hand carried into their dream schools.”

For a fascinating account of the Yale admissions process and the damaging fixation on misleading college ratings, listen to Dean Brenzel’s podcast here.

Not a few pearls but many oysters

The consequences of our upside-down priorities are important, both for hundreds of thousands of individual young students who taste rejection from a tiny ecosystem of top institutions, and also for our nation. This skewed thinking misses the true greatness of education in America: the many hundreds of fine colleges and universities where millions of young people can open the world for their enrichment. In America, there aren’t just a few academic pearls—there is a vast collegiate oyster bed stretching from sea to shining sea.

The statistics bear this out.

Any number of studies of luminaries in various professions demonstrate that far more leaders come from colleges not in the top brand rankings. This is partly a matter of numbers, as the quantity of graduates from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Stanford is tiny compared with all the rest. But it’s really more that there are hundreds of colleges and universities more than good enough to provide motivated and skilled students the education they need to succeed at the highest levels.

Malcolm Gladwell explains this overlooked fact in his newest book, Outliers: The Story of Success. If you examine, for example, where Nobel Prize winners in medicine and chemistry went to college, you’ll find no dominance of the elite schools.

It’s possible that our skewed emphasis on trying to get into a handful of top schools has an unintended benefit of handing millions of kids early rejection, which can sometimes fire more ambition. Whether or not this is the case, we should be paying more attention to helping students gain the most they can from the schools they attend. And just what would be this advice?

I put this question to Yale’s Jeffrey Brenzel, to John Jaquette, the executive director of Cornell’s campus-wide entrepreneurship program, and to Tom Morris, who for a decade was an inspired and inspiring professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. Here are a few of their recommendations:

Seek out the top professors no matter what they teach, regardless of whether it’s related to your major, and sit in on one of their lectures. It will be easy to learn who they are from campus buzz.

Reach out to your fellow students and expect to learn as much from them as from faculty members. Some will remain friends for life. Others may be future business partners.

Make a special effort to connect with students from different backgrounds. You may never have another chance to so easily gain insights into so many other cultures.

Get inside places on campus you normally wouldn’t enter. Take a tour of the bell tower, or the backstage of the theater, or the nanotechnology lab or broadcast studios—wherever you’re not likely to be as part of your regular school life.

I know from counseling my own two sons that it’s easier to give this advice than to act on it. College students are usually overloaded with work. In their few spare hours, they naturally seek the comfort of friends and familiar routes—or just a nap. But I remind my boys that their college years will fly by, and they may never again have it so easy to witness unfamiliar scenes and engage in lofty discussions with unusual people. And who knows what those encounters may touch off?

What’s your advice?

What advice do you have to share? What did you find most useful in your college years?

Put another way, if you had college to do over again, what would you do differently? I’d love to hear your stories and share them here. (Then email this to a college-age person close to you; I’d love to hear from them, too.)

Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)

For my next posting, look for a follow-up column on how to get the most from college from networking guru Keith Ferrazzi, the author of the bestselling Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back.